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How To Build High Performing Sales Teams

by Elay Cohen

September 9, 2014

How Effective Is Your Sales Team Operating?

Win as a team and never lose alone. The highest performing sales organizations have high performing sales teams that help each other. Is your sales team your best asset? Do you go to your sales team for help first on deal questions? Sales managers, here is a list of things you can do to help you and your team collaborate better together. 1. Start by building or embracing sales values that will drive the culture and cadence needed to inspire the right set of actions on your teams. Create a sales playbook based on your selling culture and best practices will energize your sales process. 2. Help your sales teams understand the power of their internal and external networks. 3. Make every moment a learning and coaching moment for your teams, and embrace the new modes of social and mobile delivery of sales training. Integrate learning and best practice sharing with the rhythm of your business by making them a part of your weekly team meetings. 4. Have a plan that maps to your business goals and is personalized for each and every sales person on your teams. 5. Be thoughtful about your communications, and remember that every word counts. Motivate your teams to be the best they can be. 6. Make onboarding a team activity for you and your team to improve ramp time, powered by accountability and peer-to-peer mentoring. 7. Bring your sales process to life by integrating it with your weekly team meetings, deal reviews, and customer-engagement strategies. Be customer focused and map your sales process to your customer’s buying process. Drive action with transformational and emotional customer stories that build trust. 8. Make prospecting a top priority for every salesperson on your team by coaching him or her to block time out each week for this important business-building activity. Make prospecting and pipeline generation a team activity with shared goals and best practice sharing around outreach strategies. 9. Instill a culture of curiosity-based selling, starting with thoughtful discovery to solve big problems. Uncover and quantify your customers’ top business issues and corporate initiatives so that you and your team become trusted value-add consultants. 10. Always be paranoid about your competition, and make sure you are being honest with yourself about your relative competitive position. Nurture a culture of winning as a team and never losing alone. You can read more about these topics in the SalesHood book. Get it today or sign up for our SaaS platform to bring these ideas to life.

About the Author

Elay Cohen

Elay Cohen is the author of SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed and the co-founder of SalesHood, a SaaS sales enablement platform and community for sales professionals. Elay is the former Senior Vice President of Sales Productivity at Salesforce. Recognized as the company's "2011 Top Executive", and credited for creating and executing all of Salesforce's sales productivity programs that accelerated its growth from $300M to $3B+ in revenue. The sales training and sales support innovations delivered over these years by Elay and his team to thousands of sales reps resulted in unprecedented hypergrowth. He also created the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category.